Trump accused of showing ‘complete indifference’ to Americans’ living costs after cancelling housing bill signing

Donald Trump has derailed what should have been a major affordability win for the GOP by abruptly cancelling the signing of a landmark housing bill into law, in a bid to pressure his party to back his restrictive proof-of-citizenship voting bill – despite being told several times they don’t have the votes to get it through.

The Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren even said of the president: “He could be over here getting a victory lap … He really doesn’t care about American families.” Cancelling its signing shows a “complete indifference to the costs Americans are facing”, she added.

The president brashly declared the bipartisan bill, aimed at speeding up ​the ​construction ⁠and availability of more affordable ​housing, was “of minor importance compared to lower interest rates, and even FISA, pales in comparison to passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT”. It’s not the first time Trump has dismissed voters’ concerns about the cost-of-living and affordability crisis, and it will be all the more frustrating for his party as it tries desperately to reset to focus on those very issues ahead of November’s crucial midterms.

Trump made the move before a lunchtime meeting with GOP senators, which he had already made clear was going to be focused on lobbying them to pass the controversial voter ID bill. The meeting was already set to be tense, given they’ve repeatedly butted heads with the president over massive issues from scepticism over his war against Iran, to rejecting funding for his White House ballroom, to Trump blocking them from confirming his own nominee for DNI. Now he’s delaying a major piece of legislation the party is desperate to use as a selling point to show voters it is focused on making their lives better.

If Trump fails to sign the housing bill into law within the 10-day window since it passed through the Senate yesterday, it automatically becomes law anyway – unless he vetoes it, but even then, support for the bill is so strong that Congress has the votes to override that.

His allies also seem to think he wouldn’t do that, including the House speaker, Mike Johnson, who said he expected the president to sign the bill within the 10-day timeframe. Johnson, unsurprisingly, defended the president’s decision to hold up the housing bill as leverage for his voter ID legislation. But the Senate majority leader, John Thune, who has tried and said many times that the math isn’t there for the voting bill to go through or to scrap the filibuster in order to push it through, simply laughed and told reporters: “At this point I don’t have any observations about that.”

Now, House GOP leaders are having to deal with the fallout of the president blindsiding his party. We’ll bring you more as the day (and drama) goes on.